HMFH 50 Forward: Carb-Unloading

CarbUnloading

Contents

CarbUnloading

01.

Introduction

03.

Change Starts at Home — With Our Commute

06.

Many Miles to Go — Looking at Our Travel Miles

08.

Operating a Low Carbon Office

10.

Waste Not

12.

Carb-Unloading: Our Commitment

CarbUnloading

The facts are clear: our emission of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is accumulating at unprecedented rates due to human activity.

Climate change is precipitating more extreme weather events and myriad effects that impact all corners of the globe.

As architects, we are positioned to shape the solution. To us, sustainability is not a line item on a budget, nor a marketing buzzword. Design that exemplifies stewardship of the environment through daylighting, connection to the outdoors, energy efficient systems, and durable, sustainably-sourced materials is core to HMFH’s business model and has been since our founding. We believe sustainability is not only achievable, but imperative. It is our duty as part of the architecture, engineering, and construction industry to lead the way forward.

2.

CARB-UNLOADING

It’s one thing to talk the talk but to celebrate our 50th anniversary, we are furthering our commitment to walk the walk. We will measure our own carbon footsteps and look at how we can unload carbon.

We will take a deep dive into our office operations to quantify, understand, and reduce our impact in the above areas.

Taken together, these efforts will give us a clear picture of the ways we can reduce emissions and lighten our firm’s carbon footprint.

We have consistently developed innovative strategies throughout our five decades of work, from one of our early high school projects that incorporated an ice storage system allowing the school to make use of off-peak electric rates, to our current projects that are designed with geothermal wells, solar thermal hot water heaters, and PV that contributes energy back to the grid.

Carb-Unloading

To continually improve our profession’s practices, we signed on to the AIA’s 2030 Commitment in 2015. This shared commitment by more than 500 firms across the country in the design and construction industry targets the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel consumption, and water consumption in the built environment with the ultimate goal of designing and building carbon-neutral buildings by 2030. In 2017, the collective efforts of the signatory firms saw a carbon savings of 17.8 million metric tons over the 2030 baseline equivalent buildings. The AEC industry is moving in the right direction, but we are committed to doing more.

Diving deeply into the strategies to reduce carbon within our office will further our understanding and ability to incorporate innovative strategies into our projects. We look forward to sharing our research and implementation of these strategies with you throughout the year!

Change Starts at Home — With Our Commute

Carb-Unloading, our initiative to reduce HMFH’s carbon footprint, challenges us to look at our own contribution to global warming.

Transportation accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions, leading us to ask: How do our commutes contribute to this statistic?

What can HMFH do to reduce our high carbon commutes?

The first step we took was to ask staff about their commuting habits. We sent a survey to the whole office to gather data about our collective commuting habits — how far we travel, the means of transportation, and the consistency of those habits. We also asked about the factors that influence these choices and for suggestions on how to encourage lower carbon commutes.

Carbon emissions vary dramatically by commuting method, ranging from zero carbon commutes of walking and cycling, to lower carbon public transit commutes, to carbon intensive solo driving.

“I like the headspace I get from my commute. ” J U ST I N V I G L I A N T I | HMFH Arc hitec ts

4.

CARB-UNLOADING

Change Starts at Home — W ith Our Commute

We knew that we’d have a lighter footprint than offices in suburban locations because of our central location in Cambridge, but we were surprised to find that 37% of the staff have a zero-emission daily commute and 35% use lower carbon public transit. Only 22% of HMFH employees drive solo to work, a fraction of the national average.

With all commutes combined, HMFH’s 45 employees are responsible for emissions totaling 35 metric tons of CO2 annually. For perspective, we would need to plant 175 trees to counteract the effects of our annual commuting.

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Our second step was to look at how we can reduce our commuting carbon footprint from this baseline. While only 22% of our employees drive to work on a regular basis, those drives account for 62% of the emissions. It was clear from our survey that people have good reasons for driving to work. While we understood the reasons that most people drove we wanted to explore operational changes that HMFH could make that would encourage people to consider driving less. We invited the whole office to come up with suggestions, and as with any creative brainstorming session, ideas ranged from small to large, and from practical to impractical, but it did prompt us to think beyond the obvious.

“On days when I could take public transit, I still choose to drive because I would need to pay for transit out of pocket, on top of my monthly parking fee.”

We realized that our parking payment structure inadvertently creates a disincentive to taking transit. If people only paid for parking on the days they drive, would they drive less often? Can we provide a company transit pass for people to use on days they don’t drive? Is there a practical way for two drivers to share one parking spot, encouraging them to use transit some of the time?

“I drive to work on days that I need to go to a job site, otherwise I’d take public transit.”

Traveling to client meetings and project sites is a major component of HMFH’s carbon footprint — big enough for an investigation of its own and a different set of creative solutions.

What our commuting survey pointed out was that job-site travel also impacts the choice to drive to work. Some of the ideas to reduce project related carbon emissions include purchasing an electric vehicle for company use, asking our local car rental office to provide low-emissions vehicles, and enhancing our video conference capabilities to reduce off-site meetings. Look forward to a later post on how we are tackling job related transportation.

“I have a crazy long drive to work. I hate it, but there’s not a reasonable transit option from my house.”

Telecommuting is common in many industries, but design requires collaboration that is hard to replicate remotely. When it makes sense, allowing HMFHers to work from home can be a benefit for them mentally and be the most effective and efficient option.

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5.

“I live close enough to bike but . . . . . . I don’t have a place to shower. . . . there’s not enough secure bike storage. . . . I can’t afford a bike right now.”

Suggested solutions ranged from asking the local gym to provide access to showers, to an office loan to to support bike purchases. We’ve started discussions with our landlord about adding bike racks within the garage and renovating a long-abandoned shower room in the building.

Through the rest of the year, we’ll continue to track office commutes and look at what the office can do to facilitate the transition to lower carbon options. At the end of this year, we’ll share how well we’ve done . . . and the creative changes we’ve made to get there.

Many Miles to Go — Looking at Our Travel Miles

The Carb-Unloading Initiative: Progress So Far When we began the Carb-Unloading initiative to reduce HMFH’s carbon footprint, we knew that traveling to client meetings and project sites was a significant part of HMFH’s footprint.

Using the HMFH Creative Process to Tackle our Carbon Footprint We believe that carb-unloading needs to be more than “doing better” in a general sense or setting impossible, all-or-nothing goals. We want to focus on concrete steps with measurable outcomes and use our talent for creative problem solving to tackle to complex challenges of climate change.

A small group of HMFHers focused on the transportation sector of Carb-Unloading got together to think about reducing our carbon footprint. Our approach to creative problem solving starts with understanding the data and holding a collaborative brainstorming session. Regardless of the challenge, all ideas are on the table, so the possibilities of innovation increase and we can see the barriers to change.

We started by gathering data to help us make decisions about the way forward. As a firm, we produced approximately 16.13 metric tons of CO2 for project-related travel around New England in 2018, spread over more than 93% of our business days. On 66% of those days, we used two or more vehicles. Obviously, the alternatives for commuting — mass transit, bicycling, or walking — are not feasible for this kind of business travel. It was time to study our options beyond conventional internal combustion.

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Travel Commuting — H ow HMFH Can Reduce its Carbon Footprint Web-based Conferencing The quickest and least expensive solution to lowering our carbon footprint is to increase something we’re already doing — video and web-based conferencing. Designing large projects requires intensive collaboration across dozens of firms meeting on a weekly basis.

Connecting with our consultants electronically can save hundreds of miles of driving each week. Newer modes of conferencing allow us to present, discuss, and modify designs on the fly, replicating the fluid and interactive work session that previously required faceto-face meeting.

7.

Where will we charge the EVs and how long will charging take?

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We’ve been talking to our landlord about installing a few charging stations in the building’s parking lot. There’s a ready source of power (the lamp post) and the Massachusetts Offers Rebates for Electric Vehicles (MOR-EV) program will pay for half the cost of installation.

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Not all charging stations are equal. A level 1 station, the least expensive type to purchase, takes 10 to 12 hours to fully charge an EV, while a level 2 station takes only a few hours.

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Charging stations can be found at parking garages, highway rest stops, and on-street parking spots. And we are adding charging stations at all of our new building projects.

What about maintenance?

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EVs are not worry free, but they are significantly less costly to maintain than vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Fewer moving parts means fewer things that can break, plus you never have to change the oil or replace worn belts.

Moving Forward

Renting Cars We rent cars for business travel three to four days a week, but our local car rental office has only one hybrid vehicle in its fleet, and they charge $10 a day more for a hybrid. We’re encouraging them to look at increasing that ratio or even offer electric vehicles (EVs).

Using hybrids would reduce our CO2 production from 16 tons a year to 11 tons; an EV would drop the number even more—to around 7.5 tons. It’s a hard sell, though. Large corporations aren’t always interested in customizing their operations for one customer, even though we’re a major user at the local branch. Another possibility is to find a rental company that uses more hybrids.

Buying Electric Vehicles With few low carbon rental options, we are considering the purchase of one or two company EVs. The cars would need to fulfill our specific criteria of a 200-mile range, capacity for a team of four, and fast charging capability. Cost is an issue, of course, but our analysis showed that owning EVs is cost neutral when compared to renting or driving personal cars. The bigger hurdles are logistics and changing the way we do things:

Dealing with project-related travel to lower HMFH’s carbon footprint is a work in progress. As a small business, we need to think carefully about the economic, administrative, and technical issues involved in altering — and in the case of EVs, radically altering — our way of doing business. Even so, we understand the time for action is now and gathering the facts has helped inform our way forward. As we continue along this path, we’ll update you on our challenges and progress toward a greener future.

Operating a Low Carbon Office

When we first made a commitment to reduce our firm’s carbon footprint, we thought our enthusiasm and willingness to walk the talk would make it easier to improve the environmental impacts of our office operations — o ur building energy consumption, for instance. Evaluate the consumption, calculate our costs to set a benchmark, cut back, and see how much energy and money we save.

It’s more complicated than that. We buy part of our power indirectly through the lease agreement with our building management company, which distributes costs of electricity and natural gas evenly among all of the tenants through the rent. Changing the thermostats can definitely impact energy consumption, but we can’t see by how much or find out what our costs are.

We control our plug and our lighting loads, though, so we’re prioritizing those to help us understand changes that are realistic.

We’re lucky for a couple of reasons. First, when our office moved from a lower floor in the building to our current location a few

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years ago, we did a complete renovation that also improved the thermal envelope and building systems. LED light fixtures, daylight harvesting controls, and chilled beams for heating and cooling have all helped reduce our energy consumption significantly. We also have lots of exterior glass around the perimeter of the building, so our office gets some great daylighting.

Second, the office location in Cambridge, MA lets us take advantage of the city’s aggregate electricity program. We can purchase 100% renewable electricity for the portion of the power that runs through our meter. We’ve also asked building management about their power, but they aggregate their own power purchases for all of the buildings they manage and aren’t pursuing 100% renewable energy purchases right now.

Because the New England power mix includes 12% renewable energy, and we purchase 100% renewable energy for about 75% of our electrical power, we’re effectively hitting the 78% carbon-free level for our office energy consumption (the other 22% represents the non-renewable electricity and natural gas we use for heating, cooling, and ventilation), so we find ourselves getting closer to our ideal carbon-neutral target.

9.

We’re still measuring our energy use to see if we can make other improvements, maybe trying some other ideas: •

Ask the building management company if they’d be willing to purchase 100% renewable energy or renewable energy credits.

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Ask them about using carbon offsets that tenants could pay for through lease arrangements.

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Add solar panels to the building or in the parking lot. This also would mean negotiating with the building management company and would have a relatively small impact on our office’s energy use (and even less for the building as a whole).

On the other hand, solar panels might be just right if they’re paired with an electric vehicle or two to use for meetings with clients or to get to job site

Reducing our carbon footprint via our office’s electric and gas consumption isn’t as easy as switching off lights and turning down thermostats, but we think we’ve made some measurable strides in the direction of carbon neutrality and we’re implementing some practical approaches to make even more.

Waste Not

As we continue our commitment to reducing HMFH’s carbon footprint through changes in our office operations, we knew consumption was an important part of the puzzle. Not only was it important to look at what our consumption patterns were, but also what we were throwing away. The goal some might say is zero waste—find a way to recycle everything and compost the rest. But when it comes to waste, transitioning from business as usual is easier said than done. At HMFH we’re tackling this like we do all things sustainability: set measurable goals and then begin! The first goal is to reduce, second reuse, third recycle (and in this case recycle also means compost) Understanding our impact on the waste stream was more fun than we had expected (we enjoy data and experiments, especially when it’s in

the name of climate action). We worked with our custodial staff to weigh the trash and recycling produced from our office for an entire month.

Once that data was collected, we calculated our average per person and we surprisingly produce an equal amount of trash to recycling which averaged out to around 9lbs per person for the month. Not surprisingly for an architecture firm, the majority of our waste is paper and the other, potentially heavier, portion comes from our kitchen.

The main contribution to our kitchen waste is from lunch and grounds from our impressive coffee intake. Given that we had already purchased reusable office mugs, dishes, and cutlery, composting seemed to be the next natural step. We’ve been researching which company works best for our office based on our location and needs. By composting, we would not only reduce our

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waste but also contribute to the health of the soils which is one of the natural ways the environment pulls carbon from the atmosphere (also known as a carbon sink).

To further reduce our food waste, we’re setting up guidelines for vendors that will require they use catering companies that support our goals for waste reduction. We are asking for buffet style instead of individual lunches, no single use cutlery/serve ware and no individual drinks. We plan to push this even further to only use companies whose desires to combat their contribution to the climate problem match ours, that list is still being developed.

Our paper use is seemingly much harder to tackle. The business of architecture requires a lot of paper, changing the way we work requires educating our staff and clients about why or when we might decide not to print. One step we’ve already taken is to install multiple touch screen monitors around the office for design coordination among project teams and purchased one that can be moved as needed. We’ve begun to research different modes for note taking: tablets with special pens that will save documents via the pad that is written on. The rest is an ongoing conversation with project teams to make sure we’re all on the same page about the goal of reduction.

What we can’t reduce we plan to continue to recycle.

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Carb-Unloading: Our Commitment

As architects, we are constantly exploring and implementing measures to make the buildings we design more energy-efficient and to reduce their carbon footprint. To do so, we consider both the materials and systems that go into our projects. This effort is also consistent with one of HMFH’s guiding design principles: Betterment.

In 2016, we signed the AIA’s 2030 Commitment; last year, in honor of our 50th anniversary as a firm, we examined our office operations to understand our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Our goal was to determine how we could modify our behaviors and practice to reduce that impact. We have called this effort “Carb-Unloading” and posted updates about the data we collected along the way.

Our investigation focused on the main components of our practice that contribute to our carbon footprint: our electricity and gas use, material consumption, waste production, travel to job sites, and employees’ commutes to the office. In each case, we examined our impact, then set definable goals for reductions.

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HMFH’s total carbon dioxide equivalents are approximately 121.5 tons per year.

The largest components break down as follows:

The biggest portion of our greenhouse gas emissions comes from our transportation, which includes both daily commuting and our regular business travel. The transportation needle is difficult to move, but we are taking incremental steps. We provide no-interest loans to employees who want to purchase bicycles to promote biking to work; we subsidize joining a bike-sharing program; and we are encouraging carpooling to construction sites. We are considering the purchase of an electric vehicle for use by employees for their trips to construction sites and meetings. We continue to request electric and hybrid cars from the rental company we use.

We switched to purchasing 100% renewable energy for the portion of our electricity consumption that we control—that which runs through our electric meter. If we didn’t purchase this renewable power, our energy consumption could be twice as high. We also use automobiles more than the typical office given our necessary travel to job sites and evening community meetings. Our building’s management company determines the energy sources and systems used to heat and cool our office. To date, we have not convinced them to switch to renewable sources, but we are pushing for this change.

In the meantime, we are trying to be conscious of our choices.

Our internal waste is not called out separately in this graphic, but is part of our office energy-use total. We have implemented operational guidelines that will reduce our waste and recycling in our office and with our lunch vendors, such as buffet-style rather than individually boxed lunches, to cut down on single-use cutlery and bottled drinks. We have also identified an independent composting company for future use.

Every effort comes with its own challenge, reminding us that no one can do this single-handedly. For now, as we continue to explore options, we have decided to purchase carbon credits to offset our greenhouse gas emissions. We considered a variety of projects and collectively voted to support a renewable energy project in Honduras that provides clean water. We will continue to monitor our emissions with the goal of reducing our global warming impact— with the ultimate goal of reducing and someday eliminating the need to purchase carbon credits to offset our emissions. At that point, our carbon credits would allow us to become carbon-negative!

We look forward to working toward that future and keeping you informed of our efforts.